Is when Western governments murder people with darker skin, different languages, different religions and living in different cultures and Westerners just compartmentalize it away.
A color guard parades the U.S. and Australian colors during the closing ceremony of exercise in 2019 in Brisbane of Talisman Sabre, an effort to improve the interoperability of the two militaries. (U.S. Navy, David Glotzbach,Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
By Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter
Reading by Tim Foley
First and foremost the west needs to stop murdering people. Ending western warmongering should take priority over every other societal concern, in the same way your husband being a serial killer would be a more urgent concern than his refusal to wash dishes.
It’s a sign of a deep sickness how much more political attention is given to domestic policy in our society than the fact that our governments are butchering human beings on other continents.
This is not to say that those domestic policy issues are not important; it is only to say that they aren’t as horrifyingly urgent as the way imperial core nations are actively participating in actual mass murder.
Healthcare? Very important. Immigrants’ rights? Very important. Social justice and equality? Very important.
But imagine if you lived in a place where western-made bombs were tearing your family and neighbors to shreds and then catching sight of a western social media post about the supreme importance of LGBTQ issues or ending discrimination against neurodivergent people.
Just pause and put yourself in those shoes for a minute.
Again and again and again thrice over, I am not saying that those issues do not matter. I’m just saying that ending the mass murder should feel like a more urgent concern. I don’t think this should be controversial.
Not an exaggeration to say the literal future of our planet depends on the total defeat of US imperialism https://t.co/zlwa4Ggeyx
— ??? (@hermit_hwarang) May 7, 2026
In no other area of our society do we have trouble making this distinction. If a mass shooting kills twenty people in your country, that’s going to receive more attention than all the other injustices and abuses that happened in your nation on that day.
The murder of a seventy year-old woman is going to be far more traumatic and significant for her community than if the same seventy year-old woman died of lung cancer.
You would not continue your discussion about intersectional feminism at the restaurant if you saw someone being strangled to death at the table across the room.
When it happens near us, to people who look like us and live like us and speak the same language as us, we have no problem understanding that murder is an urgent problem and preventing it is a foremost concern for our society.
But when our own governments are involved in the murder of people with darker skin, speaking different languages, practicing different religions and living in different cultures, we’re able to compartmentalize away from the urgency of the situation.
This says terrible things about us as a civilization. We’re no different than the wife of a serial killer who ignores the bodies being buried in the backyard because she’s more worried about what his online gambling addiction is costing the family.
We’re disconnecting ourselves from something precious and important within us in order to psychologically dissociate from the crimes of the empire in the way that we do.
This hurts our fellow human beings, but it hurts us too. We’re doing something ugly to our insides when we twist ourselves into knots to avoid facing the cold hard reality of western military slaughter.
It warps us as people. It profoundly impacts the way we experience life. It scratches the lenses of our perceptual filters. How could it not?
All these wars and genocidal atrocities are an invitation to reclaim a sacred part of ourselves by treating them with the urgency they deserve. There’s no way to live an authentic life and move into a truth-based relationship with reality without doing so.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
This article is from Caitlin’s Newsletter and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
